As the horror of violence, rape, and murder of Jews in Israel by Hamas terrorists unfolded this past week I was astonished—and sickened—to hear the “whataboutism” and “bothsideism” response of many commentators and activists on the political Left that sounded eerily similar to the moral equivalency arguments I encountered when researching my book Denying History, on “who says the Holocaust never happened and why do they say it?” (co-authored with Alex Grobman). To be fair, some commentators on the political Right have used their platforms to blame Joe Biden for enabling or emboldening Iran to back Hamas terrorism—as Ted Cruz did on Megyn Kelly’s show—but at least the Right has the moral clarity to distinguish between genocide and complex political issues such as instituting a Two-State solution to the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Left: pictures from the entrance of Kibbutz Be'eri in which a car of civilians attempted to escape and Hamas burned them alive. Posted on X by Ben Shapiro. Right: U.S. soldiers discover bodies stuffed into an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945.
By contrast, the progressive Left (a term I use to distinguish them from more mainstream center-left liberals and classical liberals) seems hopelessly adrift at sea without a moral compass. As I posted on X, what’s the difference between White supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia chanting "Jews will not replace us" and “You will not replace us” and Palestinian Supremacists at a rally in Sydney, Australia celebrating the Hamas murder of Jews chanting "Gas the Jews" and “Fuck the Jews”? If you go far enough to the Left you end up on the far end of the Right. (This is called the horseshoe theory, in which the far Left and the far Right are actually close in ideology at the two ends of the bent political spectrum.)
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In another post on X I declared that it is not fair to compare Hamas to Nazis (which some on the Right are doing)—not fair to the Nazis I meant! Why? Because at least the Nazis knew that the orchestrated extermination of European Jewry was wrong and would be condemned by other nations. That’s why the Nazis murdered most of the Jews (and others) in secret, mostly in isolated death camps in Eastern Europe and Poland, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Belzec. That’s why the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) Einsatzgruppen death squads responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, was conducted far from the prying eyes of German citizens in Nazi occupied territories to the East. That’s why the Wannsee Protocol, like that of most Nazi documents in dealing with the “Jewish question,” is obfuscated by innocuous-sounding jargon, such as:
action, special action, large-scale action, reprisal action, pacification action, radical action, cleaning-up or cleansing action, cleared or cleared of Jews, freeing the area of Jews, Jewish problem solved, handled appropriately, handled according to orders, liquidated, over-hauling, rendered harmless, ruthless collection measures, severe measures, special treatment or special measures, executive tasks, elimination, evacuation, eradication, relocation, and, of course, Final Solution (Endlösung).
That’s why this letter from Heinrich Himmler to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded Reinhard Heydrich as chief of security police and SD after Heydrich’s assassination, is declared to be “Top Secret!”:
Reichsfuhrer-SS Field HQ
April 9, 1943
Top Secret!
To the Chief of the Security Police and SD Berlin:
I have received the Inspector of Statistics’ report on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. I consider this report well executed for purposes of camouflage and potentially useful for later times. For the moment, it can neither be published nor can anyone be allowed sight of it. The most important for me remains that whatever remains of Jews is shipped East. All I want to be told as of now by the Security Police, very briefly, is what has been shipped and what, at any points, is still left of Jews.
Hh
That’s why at war's end the Nazis covered over their crimes, burned documents, destroyed the crematoria and gas chambers, and denied any wrong doing after. And that’s why throughout the 1930s the Nazis went to great lengths to change German law to later justify their actions as legal, under the pretense that if they lost the war they could argue—which they did at the Nuremberg war-crime trials—that national sovereignty precludes one nation judging the actions of members of another nation whose laws differed at the time. That defense didn’t fly and the murderers were brought to justice.
By contrast, far from denying their crimes, for the past week Hamas has been bragging about murdering Jews, posting videos on social media and declaring "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great). Worse, many on the progressive Left in the United States have been condemning…Israel! At The Free Press Bari Weiss has compiled a list of examples that reveal, in her words, “the rot inside our universities”:
Over 30 student groups at Harvard said of the 1,200 Israelis who have been slaughtered that “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”
A joint statement from Columbia University’s Palestine Solidarity groups wrote “we remind Columbia students that the Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”
A student group at California State University in Long Beach advertised its “Day of Resistance: Protest for Palestine” event on Tuesday with a poster that showed a crowd waving the Palestinian flag and a Hamas paraglider—a symbol of mass murder—in the top corner.
At Stanford, hand-painted signs appeared on buildings declaring: “The Israeli occupation is NOTHING BUT AN ILLUSION OF DUST.” (In TheStanford Review, Free Press intern Julia Steinberg wrote that, on Instagram, “my classmates posted infographics declaring that, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ ”)
Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia declared on Sunday that “The events that took place yesterday are a step towards a free Palestine.”
To be blunt, these people are genocide deniers, almost indistinguishable from the Holocaust deniers I encountered and debunked over twenty years ago. Here is what we wrote in Denying History about the moral equivalency argument and why it is not just wrong but morally obscene:
Ironically, after denying that the Nazis intended to exterminate the Jews, deniers argue that what the Nazis did to the Jews is really no different from what other nations do to their perceived enemies. David Irving, for example, points out that the U.S. government obliterated two Japanese cities and their civilian populations with atomic weapons—the only government in history to do so. Furthermore, Mark Weber notes, Americans concentrated Japanese Americans in camps, much as Germans did to their perceived internal enemy—the Jews. These examples and others, such as Irving’s citation of the mass bombing of Dresden, have a not-so-hidden agenda: to implicate America and Britain as equally guilty, along with Germany, in the mass destruction of the Second World War.
But what is missing in this comparison? First, there is a big difference between two nations fighting one another, both using trained soldiers, and the systematic, state-organized killing of unarmed, unsuspecting people—not in self-defense, not to gain territory or wealth (although these may accrue as a beneficial by-product), but because of anti-Semitism. Scholars and the general public debate the morality of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, and the mass bombing of Dresden. But historians do not try to equate these actions with the Holocaust. If we take the mass bombing of Dresden, for instance—although it was admittedly one of the worst acts against the Axis powers by the Allies, it resulted in about 35,000 deaths, not the 250,000 first claimed by the Germans (Goebbles exaggerated the number for propaganda purposes), and nowhere near the 6 million of the Holocaust.
At his trial in Jerusalem Adolf Eichmann, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer of the Reich Security Main Office and one of the chief planners and organizers of the Final solution, tried to make the moral equivalency argument. The judge, however, did not accept his rationalizations, as this sequence from the trial transcript shows (and let this serve as a refutation of today’s claim for the moral equivalency of Hamas and Israel):
Judge Benjamin Halevi to Eichmann: You have often compared the extermination of the Jews with the bombing raids on German cities and you compared the murder of Jewish women and children with the death of German women in aerial bombardments. Surely it must be clear to you that there is a basic distinction between these two things. On the one hand the bombing is used as an instrument of forcing the enemy to surrender. Just as the Germans tried to force the British to surrender by their bombing. In that case it is a war objective to bring an armed enemy to his knees. On the other hand, when you take unarmed Jewish men, women, and children from their homes, hand then over to the Gestapo, and then send the to Auschwitz for extermination it is an entirely different thing, is it not?
Eichmann: The difference is enormous. But at that time these crimes had been legalized by the state and the responsibility, therefore, belongs to those who issued the orders.
Judge Halevi: But you must know surely that there are internationally recognized Laws and Customs of War whereby the civilian population is protected from actions which are not essential for the prosecution of the war itself.
Eichmann: Yes, I am aware of that.
Judge Halevi: Did you never feel a conflict of loyalties between your duty and your conscience?
Eichmann: I suppose one could call it an internal split. It was a personal dilemma when one swayed from one extreme to the other.
Judge Halevi: One had to overlook and forget one’s conscience.
Eichmann: Yes, one could put it that way.
In assessing the initial response to the rape, torture, and murder of Jews in Israel by Hamas this week I can only conclude that the progressive Left denouncing Israel and celebrating Hamas have had to overlook and forget their moral conscience.
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What I really find troubling about this line of thinking, Michael, is the very western mental model in superficially tackling such a complex and complicated issue as the Israeli/Palestinian issue. What you are really highlighting here is merely how left and right leaning people, primarily living in the west, view this issue and which one has the high moral ground.
You proclaim to lay down some hard facts in an effort to draw a parallel and support your position: ‘although it was admittedly one of the worst acts against the Axis powers by the Allies, it resulted in about 35,000 deaths, not the 250,000 first claimed by the Germans (Goebbles exaggerated the number for propaganda purposes), and nowhere near the 6 million of the Holocaust.’ So is the number of civilian casualties a benchmark of right/wrong? You are implying that the Allies killed only 35,000 (a drop in the bucket when compared to the alleged 250,00 or the 6 million) in this instance. Great. Let’s go with this parallel. Now, how many Israelis have been killed by Palestinians compared with the other way around? If numbers are your benchmark, I would conclude that Israelis get a higher score for Palestinian hating than Palestinians get for Israeli hating. In that vein, have you not been able to draw a similar conclusion from all your arguments that Israel is starkly anti Palestinian just as you accuse the Palestinians of being anti Jewish/Israeli/Semitic?
I see the majority of western responses trying to be on the right side of history while simultaneously excising this incident from any historical context. Apart from pointing out that Hamas is Islamist (so? Israel is Jewish and current government is on the hard right side of politics) and has been clinging to power since 2006 (Bibi has been in power for some time, too..). Do you not even take a cursory glance at Israeli/Palestinian relations before the rise of Hamas? Did the Palestinians have it better with Israel, you think, before they chose to go with Hamas? Did Hamas win hearts and minds merely because they were anti Israel? Again, this whole issue seems to be surgically removed from its historical context by the western mind and oversimplified (the victors who got to not only orchestrate events on the ground and hence, write history but dictate it to the rest of the world) and then neatly placed within liberal/left vs conservative/right buckets. I wish life were that simple; you’re either with us or against us.
I would assume this investigation is beyond the remit or interest of this writer and his audience as most of the comments relate to a quibble about jargon such as progressives/liberals and how one appropriately defines these terms. The issue at hand is nothing more than a tool to buttress one’s political leanings.
And to be clear, it’s not about maintaining a moral equivalence or qualifying the issue with a two-sided approach - as opposed to the one sided approach here. I would call for a more comprehensive view where you use your yardstick of measurement (morality; numbers vis à vis [holocaust] casualties) for a deeper and more honest view. Otherwise, you have an incomplete model of reality at best and skewed/biased at worst.
Also, I understand what the motives of the Nazis towards the holocaust were; eradication of Jews from the motherland (earth) based on a racial perspective and misplaced grievances. How can you draw this parallel here and not catch the irony of your own analogy? Have the superior Israelis/Jews, aided and abetted by the west, not done onto the Palestinians what had been done to them by the superior Nazi state apparatus (Palestine is an entity and not a country)? How can people say that the Israelis have been acting in self defence in attacking the Palestinians who are also native to the land without laying down the facts? How can you not be curious about investigating their claims? You speak of numbers and precise historical facts regarding the holocaust but I’m curious as to why you choose not to do so when it comes to the conflict happening now. The European Jews were dispossessed of their belongings and kicked out of their homes and forced to live in ghettos (fact). The Palestinians have been subjected to the same treatment at the hands of the Israelis (is this not a fact? Or is this a lesser fact?). Do you have evidence to the contrary? How can you bring the holocaust as an equivalent yet turn it on its head? Like the holocaust deniers that you bemoan, you seem to implicitly engage in the denial of the eradication of Palestine and Palestinians. This can only mean one thing, which is ideology. And your rhetoric disparages any thinking that challenges that opinion.
Yes, what Hamas did was abhorrent but if you’re quantifying and qualifying grievances on both sides of this conflict, by your own logic, Israel has much to answer for and should come out with blood on its hands.
Thought experiment: If the European Jews retaliated against the murderous Nazis by mounting guerrilla attacks, I am assuming you would be strongly opposed to that on moral grounds, correct?
I am a subscriber to your magazine and enjoy reading your books. I am not surprised, however, by your reasoning. The rhetoric I have been hearing in western circles for sone time now is that yes, the Palestinians may be at a disadvantage when it comes to Israel but they should suffer in silence or maybe use diplomatic means to raise their cause. Both have been done to no avail. What would you and all your readers do in their place? Either flee or suffer in silence? Is that the moralistic thing to do? Should they form a secular resistance rather than a religious one? Would that give their struggle more legitimacy? The PLO tried doing that, by the way..
To borrow some of your religious metaphors, is the holocaust the original sin of the west and the founding of Israel - that goes hand in hand with colonisation of Palestine and eradication of its people - its redemption? And finally, in the moralising world that you and the majority of your readers inhabit, is there a slight chance that the Palestinians do not see it that way? That would be the true mind of a sceptic..
While I appreciate and agree with the article's condemnation of moral equivalency, this article makes an overly broad claim that this is a problem among "progressive left" groups. In reality, the "progressive" groups the article mentions are NOT a broad cross-section of the progressive left; they are almost *entirely* Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian! (Here, I encourage the interested reader to dig up the list of the 30 groups that signed the Harvard letter--almost all are Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian). Yes, the DSA-NYC publicized a rally, which was wrong and stupid, and already has tried to walk back from it. It is important to consider the Venn diagram--the moral equivalency, so far, is one small (Arab/Muslim/Palestinian) circle nested within a larger (progressive) circle.
Moral Equivalency and its Discontents
What I really find troubling about this line of thinking, Michael, is the very western mental model in superficially tackling such a complex and complicated issue as the Israeli/Palestinian issue. What you are really highlighting here is merely how left and right leaning people, primarily living in the west, view this issue and which one has the high moral ground.
You proclaim to lay down some hard facts in an effort to draw a parallel and support your position: ‘although it was admittedly one of the worst acts against the Axis powers by the Allies, it resulted in about 35,000 deaths, not the 250,000 first claimed by the Germans (Goebbles exaggerated the number for propaganda purposes), and nowhere near the 6 million of the Holocaust.’ So is the number of civilian casualties a benchmark of right/wrong? You are implying that the Allies killed only 35,000 (a drop in the bucket when compared to the alleged 250,00 or the 6 million) in this instance. Great. Let’s go with this parallel. Now, how many Israelis have been killed by Palestinians compared with the other way around? If numbers are your benchmark, I would conclude that Israelis get a higher score for Palestinian hating than Palestinians get for Israeli hating. In that vein, have you not been able to draw a similar conclusion from all your arguments that Israel is starkly anti Palestinian just as you accuse the Palestinians of being anti Jewish/Israeli/Semitic?
I see the majority of western responses trying to be on the right side of history while simultaneously excising this incident from any historical context. Apart from pointing out that Hamas is Islamist (so? Israel is Jewish and current government is on the hard right side of politics) and has been clinging to power since 2006 (Bibi has been in power for some time, too..). Do you not even take a cursory glance at Israeli/Palestinian relations before the rise of Hamas? Did the Palestinians have it better with Israel, you think, before they chose to go with Hamas? Did Hamas win hearts and minds merely because they were anti Israel? Again, this whole issue seems to be surgically removed from its historical context by the western mind and oversimplified (the victors who got to not only orchestrate events on the ground and hence, write history but dictate it to the rest of the world) and then neatly placed within liberal/left vs conservative/right buckets. I wish life were that simple; you’re either with us or against us.
I would assume this investigation is beyond the remit or interest of this writer and his audience as most of the comments relate to a quibble about jargon such as progressives/liberals and how one appropriately defines these terms. The issue at hand is nothing more than a tool to buttress one’s political leanings.
And to be clear, it’s not about maintaining a moral equivalence or qualifying the issue with a two-sided approach - as opposed to the one sided approach here. I would call for a more comprehensive view where you use your yardstick of measurement (morality; numbers vis à vis [holocaust] casualties) for a deeper and more honest view. Otherwise, you have an incomplete model of reality at best and skewed/biased at worst.
Also, I understand what the motives of the Nazis towards the holocaust were; eradication of Jews from the motherland (earth) based on a racial perspective and misplaced grievances. How can you draw this parallel here and not catch the irony of your own analogy? Have the superior Israelis/Jews, aided and abetted by the west, not done onto the Palestinians what had been done to them by the superior Nazi state apparatus (Palestine is an entity and not a country)? How can people say that the Israelis have been acting in self defence in attacking the Palestinians who are also native to the land without laying down the facts? How can you not be curious about investigating their claims? You speak of numbers and precise historical facts regarding the holocaust but I’m curious as to why you choose not to do so when it comes to the conflict happening now. The European Jews were dispossessed of their belongings and kicked out of their homes and forced to live in ghettos (fact). The Palestinians have been subjected to the same treatment at the hands of the Israelis (is this not a fact? Or is this a lesser fact?). Do you have evidence to the contrary? How can you bring the holocaust as an equivalent yet turn it on its head? Like the holocaust deniers that you bemoan, you seem to implicitly engage in the denial of the eradication of Palestine and Palestinians. This can only mean one thing, which is ideology. And your rhetoric disparages any thinking that challenges that opinion.
Yes, what Hamas did was abhorrent but if you’re quantifying and qualifying grievances on both sides of this conflict, by your own logic, Israel has much to answer for and should come out with blood on its hands.
Thought experiment: If the European Jews retaliated against the murderous Nazis by mounting guerrilla attacks, I am assuming you would be strongly opposed to that on moral grounds, correct?
I am a subscriber to your magazine and enjoy reading your books. I am not surprised, however, by your reasoning. The rhetoric I have been hearing in western circles for sone time now is that yes, the Palestinians may be at a disadvantage when it comes to Israel but they should suffer in silence or maybe use diplomatic means to raise their cause. Both have been done to no avail. What would you and all your readers do in their place? Either flee or suffer in silence? Is that the moralistic thing to do? Should they form a secular resistance rather than a religious one? Would that give their struggle more legitimacy? The PLO tried doing that, by the way..
To borrow some of your religious metaphors, is the holocaust the original sin of the west and the founding of Israel - that goes hand in hand with colonisation of Palestine and eradication of its people - its redemption? And finally, in the moralising world that you and the majority of your readers inhabit, is there a slight chance that the Palestinians do not see it that way? That would be the true mind of a sceptic..
While I appreciate and agree with the article's condemnation of moral equivalency, this article makes an overly broad claim that this is a problem among "progressive left" groups. In reality, the "progressive" groups the article mentions are NOT a broad cross-section of the progressive left; they are almost *entirely* Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian! (Here, I encourage the interested reader to dig up the list of the 30 groups that signed the Harvard letter--almost all are Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian). Yes, the DSA-NYC publicized a rally, which was wrong and stupid, and already has tried to walk back from it. It is important to consider the Venn diagram--the moral equivalency, so far, is one small (Arab/Muslim/Palestinian) circle nested within a larger (progressive) circle.